Month: April 2018

I can remember it like it was yesterday: being a teen-ager, barely turned 18 (at the time, you could enlist at 17, and I did), lying in my bunk on a guided missile cruiser off of the coast of someplace or other.  Thinking: if only I could go back and finish high school…  National Poetry Month is not National Poetry Month without Henry Reed’s wistful beauty.  His meditation on time and the way that some times can be much farther away — or closer — than others in Judging Distances always takes me back to my misguided youth and that rack (bunk) on the USS Biddle.  I got this version of the poem from the Sole Arabian Tree web site; at the bottom of their page, you can find a link to a recording of it.  After the text, you’ll find a couple of notes on the vocabulary.

LESSONS OF THE WAR, by Henry Reed 

Published 1943

II. JUDGING DISTANCES

Not only how far away, but the way that you say it
Is very important. Perhaps you may never get
The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know
How to report on a landscape: the central sector,
The right of the arc and that, which we had last Tuesday,
And at least you know

That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army
Happens to be concerned—the reason being,
Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know
There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,
And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly
That things only seem to be things.

A barn is not called a barn, to put it more plainly,
Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.
You must never be over-sure. You must say, when reporting:
At five o’clock in the central sector is a dozen
Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,
Don’t call the bleeders sheep.

I am sure that’s quite clear; and suppose, for the sake of example,
The one at the end, asleep, endeavors to tell us
What he sees over there to the west, and how far away,
After first having come to attention. There to the west,
On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow
Vestments of purple and gold.

The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,
And under the swaying elms a man and a woman
Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say
That there is a row of houses to the left of the arc,
And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans
Appear to be loving.

Well that, for an answer, is what we rightly call
Moderately satisfactory only, the reason being,
Is that two things have been omitted, and those are very important.
The human beings, now: in what direction are they,
And how far away, would you say? And do not forget
There may be dead ground in between.

There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got
The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture
A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,
(Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)
At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance
Of about one year and a half.

English notes

knack: “an ability, talent, or special skill needed to do something” (Merriam-Webster).  You “have” a (or the) knack “for” doing something, after you “get” a (or the) knack “for” doing it–you learn it.   Merriam-Webster gives a list of synonyms for knack: 

aptitude, bent, endowment, faculty, flair, genius, gift, head, talent

…and then gives a wonderful discussion of them that does a nice job of making the point that there aren’t really any synonyms:

gift, faculty, aptitude, bent, talent, genius, knack mean a special ability for doing something. gift often implies special favor by God or nature.

• • ⟨the gift of singing beautifully⟩

faculty applies to an innate or less often acquired ability for a particular accomplishment or function.

• • ⟨a faculty for remembering names⟩

aptitude implies a natural liking for some activity and the likelihood of success in it.

• • ⟨a mechanicalaptitude⟩

bent is nearly equal to aptitude but it stresses inclination perhaps more than specific ability.

• • ⟨a family with an artistic bent⟩

talent suggests a marked natural ability that needs to be developed.

• • ⟨has enough talent to succeed⟩

geniussuggests impressive inborn creative ability.

• • ⟨has no greatgenius for poetry⟩

knack implies a comparatively minor but special ability making for ease and dexterity in performance.

• • ⟨the knack of getting along⟩

Knack appears in the poem twice–in the beginning:

Perhaps you may never get
The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know
How to report on a landscape

…and then in those stunning last lines:

                                                          I may not have got
The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture
A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,
(Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)
At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance
Of about one year and a half.

barn: “a building used for storing grain and hay and for housing farm animals” (Merriam-Webster)  Merriam-Webster gives an obscure definition of barn that I have never, ever come across before: : a unit of area equal to 10⁻²⁴ square centimeters that is used in nuclear physics for measuring cross section.

As broad as a barn door is an analogy used to describe something that is very wide.  The most common thing to describe as being broad as a barn door is someone’s ass, and that’s not typically a compliment.  Looking for examples on the Sketch Engine web site, I see very few uses of broad as a barn door that are not negative.  (You’ll also see big as a barn door and wide as a barn door.  Why miss the opportunity for some alliteration?)

• I had my first look at the boom horse Hay List . He’s built like a tank with a backside as big as a barn door.
•  And since security companies advise against “unsubscribing” from spam, since to most spammers, this merely means the address is active, the hole in the law is as wide as a barn door.
• I have sent you a cheque for what you asked, you are very modest in your request for which I like you all the better; a Colonist would have opened his mouth as wide as a barn door.
• Now, for Europe, this means we have to absolutely cancel the EU Treaties from Maastricht to Lisbon, we have to return to national currencies, and we have to establish, simultaneously, a global Glass-Steagall Act, and I mean the real Glass-Steagall as Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed it, and not some watered-down versions like the Vickers Commission ring-fencing, or Volcker Rule, which leave holes for banking speculation as big as a barn door.
• But the chain remained tangled, and amid all kinds of mocking advice we drifted down upon and fouled the Ghost, whose bowsprit poked square through our mainsail and ripped a hole in it as big as a barn door.

I love that the drill instructor tells the new recruits not to call a barn a barn, but doesn’t tell them what they should call it:

A barn is not called a barn, to put it more plainly,
Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.

dead ground: technically, this is space that cannot be observed.  Tracing back through references, it seems to have come from a term for describing parts of the base of a castle’s fortifying walls that were sheltered from fire by the defenders, and therefore were weak points vulnerable to attack.  Here’s one Quora writer’s definition of it:

Dead Ground is when the observer is unable to resolve keeping eyes on over an intermediate part of the stretch of ground being observed. The observer may be interchanged with detection equipment and includes areas of surveillance which are obscured from a clear alarm signature (environmental distortion from clear auditory reception) or trigger reception (automatic pixel motion detection) by the way the observer is angled. Dead ground exists in hidden embankments and undulating paths, roads or desert open areas with heat waves rising and obscuring or creating distorted imagery.

Some examples from the enTenTen corpus, searched via the Sketch Engine web site:

• Small valleys and dead ground permitted the enemy to approach without being observed.
• Bravo started firing at the antiaircraft gun with small-arms, this almost proved fatal, as their target immediately cut loose in retaliation, luckily for Bravo they were in dead ground , and the hail of fire passed harmlessly overhead , as the Swapo gunners could not depress their gun sufficiently, yet it was a sobering experience.

“Dead ground” shows up twice in the poem, both towards the aforementioned stunning last lines:

The human beings, now: in what direction are they,
And how far away, would you say? And do not forget
There may be dead ground in between.

There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got
The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture
A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,
(Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)
At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance
Of about one year and a half.

The chestnuts are blooming in the Place Cambronne.  At this time of year, I stop there on my way home from work (on my way to work, I study vocabulary, and don’t notice them), and rejoice in the knowledge that they will survive even the zombie apocalypse.  Of course, blooming chestnut trees means National Poetry Month; since we have a thin-skinned assclown–a man-baby who rages in response to tweets and threatens the press when he doesn’t like their reporting–a bigot who accuses judges of not being impartial on the basis of their parents’ national origin–an immoral villain who equates white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the people who stand up to them–with his fingers on the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, I propose a timely bit of Robert Browning.  Follow this link if you’d like to hear a pretty good recording thereof.  The poem is pretty disturbing in and of itself, and all the more so with Trump in the presidency.  I gave commands;  then all smiles stopped together. There she stands  as if alive….Notice Neptune, though…thought a rarity, which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!  (Rough translation: I had her killed.  Hey, look at this great thing that I have!)

The poem was published in 1842, and some of the language bears explication.  I’ll give you the modern and/or non-poetic equivalents of some of the verbs:

• will’t: “will it”  Will’t please you sit and look at her?
• durst: “dared”  And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, //
  How such a glance came there;
• ’twas: “it was”  Sir, ’twas not // Her husband’s presence only, called that spot // Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek;
• whate’er: “whatever”  she liked whate’er // She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
•  whene’ever: “whenever”  Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, // Whene’er I passed her;

…and the English notes explain some of the words that I used in writing this post.

My Last Duchess

Robert Browning

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Want a French translation of this poem?  See the Wikipédia page here.

English notes

assclown: “someone who, wrongly, thinks his actions are clever, funny, or worthwhile.”  ““someone who seeks an audience’s enjoyment while being slow to understand how it views him.”  A specific kind of asshole, defined as “A person counts as an asshole, when and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”  Sources: John Kelly on the Strong Language blog, and Aaron James, in his book Assholes: a theory of Donald Trump.

Fra: “used as a title equivalent to brother preceding the name of an Italian monk or friar” (Merriam-Webster).  My best guess is that it’s used here to suggest that the Duke things that the painter was overly familiar (brother) with his wife, and/or that his wife was overly familiar with the painter.

familiar: a word with at least two parts of speech (adjective, of course, but also noun).  In the poem, it’s used with the meaning of informal, friendly; it can also mean something well-known (the familiar works of Shakespeare).

Trigger warning: vulgar reference to reproductive anatomy.  Oh, and National Poetry Month continues with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, That time of year thou mayst in me behold.

Thanksgiving Day is a purely American holiday.  OK: it’s a harvest holiday, and practically everybody has a harvest holiday.  But, it’s ours, and we love it.  An American who is not with family and friends on Thanksgiving Day is a lonely American; les Amerloques will travel amazing distances and spend enormous amounts of money just to spend the last Thursday in November with their families, and then head back to wherever they normally are 48 hours later.

I studied literature and linguistics at a college in a little town in rural Virginia.  Nobody was from there, so essentially the entire student body left to go home for the holiday.  Thanksgiving Day is the last Thursday in November (I know I already mentioned that, but it seems weird enough to be worth repeating), and you have to leave a couple days before that to get home–but, when, exactly, can you leave?  The college’s rule was this: classes ended at noon on Tuesday, and then you could do as you wished.

Classes ended at noon, and I had a class at 11.  I was going nowhere, and I was a more-than-obsessive student, so you can bet your ass that I was there at 11.  (You can bet your ass that explained in the English notes below.)  Me–and the professor.  And nobody else.

If I were that professor today, I would just take that student out for a cup of coffee and make them teach me about logarithms, I suppose.  But, I’m a fat old bald guy who will be retired in the blink of an eye (English notes, don’t worry), and my professor was a young guy in need of tenure.  He shrugged his shoulders–and taught me.

No, he didn’t lecture: I sat at a desk, he sat on the desk, and he taught me how to do a “close reading” of a poem.  There must be a technical definition of close reading–my understanding of it is: look up every fucking word.  Do that, and you are likely to be surprised at the connections that you see, the networks of words, the multiple champs lexicaux in the poem–maybe one was obvious to you, but there are probably more than that, and noticing them is part of the pleasure of the whole thing.  (Taking pleasure in analyzing a poem to death might be another one of those reasons that I get divorced so often.)

The latest and greatest thing in literary studies is “distant reading.”  It’s called that precisely to draw the clearest possible contrast with “close reading.”  The idea behind distant reading is that you don’t actually read anything–rather, you use a computer to analyze entire literatures.  As Franco Moretti, the godfather of this stuff, puts it: you can read one book, and then another, and then another, for the rest of your life–at the end, all that you will know is those books.  If you want to understand literature, then you have to look at giant collections of it.  People who do distant reading do what I do with biomedical texts, except they write their papers about things like this:

“The Emotions of London”, written by Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, and Erik Steiner, inaugurates a new field of work for the Literary Lab — that of literary and cultural geography. Working on a corpus of 5,000 novels, and covering the two centuries from 1700 to 1900, this pamphlet charts the uneven development of social spaces and fictional structures, bringing to light the long-term connection between emotion and class in narrative representations of London.  Stanford Literary Lab

…rather than stuff like this, as I do:

Prior knowledge of the distributional characteristics of linguistic phenomena can be useful for a variety of language processing tasks. This paper describes the distribution of negation in two types of biomedical texts: scientific journal articles and progress notes. Two types of negation are examined: explicit negation at the syntactic level and affixal negation at the sub-word level. The data show that the distribution of negation is significantly different in the two document types, with explicit negation more frequent in the clinical documents than in the scientific publications and affixal negation more frequent in the journal articles at the type level and token levels.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which is the more interesting.  Or, don’t choose–immerse yourself in both.  Whatever–it’s all fun.

Today, we’ll go closer to the close reading end of the continuum with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73–an appropriate one for a fat old bald guy such as myself, as it speaks of love at the end of life.  (Obviously, it would be even more appropriate if I could ever get a second date–alas.)  The target in our sights: the words Death’s second self, which have always puzzled me.  (For context: I took three semesters of Shakespeare in college, and I mostly wrote my papers about linguistic aspects of the Bard, so things in his work don’t usually perplex me for decades, like Death’ second self has.)  That second self is pretty goddamn opaque to a native speaker of English–today.  It is an old term that has a meaning of its own:

second self: one who associates so closely with a person as to assume that person’s mode of behavior, personality, beliefs, etc.  (Dictionary.com)

Now, you have to realize: linguists approach dictionaries with more than a little bit of suspicion.  Make it an on-line dictionary of unclear provenance, and my antennae really go up: is this a justifiable definition, or did whoever wrote it base it entirely on their interpretation of its appearance in Shakespeare’s sonnet?

I can’t know what was in the definition writer’s head–hell, I can’t even tell you what’s in any of my many ex-wives’ heads (see previous mentions on this blog of how often I get divorced).  Honestly, most of the time I’m not even sure what’s in my head.  But, I can look at some data–that’s what linguists do, right?  (That’s a bit of sarcasm, but I’m wandering way too far off the track of National Poetry Month already.)   Off I go to the Sketch Engine web site, purveyor of fine linguistic corpora and the tools for searching them, where I find the English Historical Books Collection, containing 826,000,000 words of text from English books published between 1473 and 1820.  A search for second self shows me that the phrase occurs at a rate of 0.04 times per million words, and gives me examples like this:

• …one correspondent to him, suitable both to his nature and necessity, one altogether like to him in shape and constitution, disposition and affection, a second self …
• THERE is the Relation of Trustees to those that trust them: for he who trusteth another doth thereby create a very near and intimate Relation to him; so far forth as he trusteth him, he putteth his case into his hands, and depositeth his Interest in his Disposal, and thereby createth him his Proxy, or his second self.
• God is the most Pure, Simple, Uncompounded Being; and if God, who has no parts, and cannot be divided into any, begets a Son, he must Communicate his Whole, Undivided Nature to him: For to beget a Son, is to Communicate his own Nature to him; and if he have no parts, he cannot Communicate a part, but must Communicate the Whole; that is, he must Communicate his whole self, and be a second self in his Son.

So: I don’t know how the lexicographer came up with their definition, but it looks pretty consistent with the data that I found.  How common was it, actually?  I did a search for it in Google Books between the years 1500 and 2000.  You’ll see a graph of the output at the end of this post.  Why did I also search for my dog?  Because numbers in isolation mean nothing–in order to know whether a number is large or small, you have to compare it to something else.  (The best movie line ever: 5 inches is a lot of snow, and it’s a TREMENDOUS amount of rain, but it’s not very much dick.)  So, I picked a phrase that isn’t necessarily very frequent (relatively speaking), but isn’t exactly weird, either.

…And with that fabulous line from the incredible film L.I.E., I’ll leave you with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73.  Scroll down past the graph that follows it for the English notes, and I hope that your second self (should you have one) is every bit as nice as you are.

Sonnet 73

William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=second+self%2Cmy+dog&year_start=1500&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csecond%20self%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmy%20dog%3B%2Cc0
That spike centered around 1670 or so?  Could be real, but you would want to verify it–things like that in any kind of graph tend to reflect either some event that it should be very easy to track down, or a problem with the data itself.

English notes

you can bet your ass that… “You can believe that it is absolutely true that…”  This is quite vulgar–don’t say it in front of my grandmother.  Some examples:

• If someone is trying to kill me and/or my loved ones, you can bet your ass that I’ll take him out first.
• #1 Rule … If it sounds like a good deal and is widely advertised, you can bet your ass that you are not the first person to call, and if its such a marvelous deal how come its still for sale?
• Oh and you can bet your ass that neither one of them will be in a good mood at 6:00 when I wake them.
• Sadly, Ted, if you examine his statements, then see that he specializes in benefits & employment law, you can bet your ass that his clients are vicious capitalist pigs, who love his union- & employee-busting ways.

(Examples from the enTenTen13 corpus–19.7 billion words of written English, searched via the Sketch Engine web site.)   How I used it in the post:  I was going nowhere, and I was a more-than-obsessive student, so you can bet your ass that I was there at 11. 

you bet your ass: this is basically a very emphatic (and vulgar–don’t say it in front of my grandmother) way of saying “yes.”

• Am I using a bunch of recycled selfies? You bet your ass I am (Twitter)
• Not even gonna lie, I ordered chinese food yesterday night and while I was eating I found a pinkie nail sized piece of plastic in it. Was I grossed out? Yeah. Did I keep eating? YOU BET YOUR ASS (Twitter)
• Me, depressed? You bet your ass (Twitter)
• Just got offered a trip to Florida so I can lay by the pool&drink at our family friend’s new house and be bait to get his son and college buddies there to help move furniture… You bet your ass I said yes (Twitter)

in the blink of an eye: very fast, very quickly, immediately.

• One wrong turn in an Ikea and you can go from bathrooms to bedroom furniture in the blink of an eye, losing the other members of your party just as quickly.
• Now, with the advent of social media, you can turn to a quarter million people and get their opinion in the blink of an eye–as long as you have sophisticated tools like NetBase’s to automatically analyze all that chatter so quickly.
• But if they didn’t go along with her every whim, or worse, wanted to stop the relationship, she would go from singing their praises to trash-talking everything about them in the blink of an eye.

How I used it in the post: But, I’m a fat old bald guy who will be retired in the blink of an eye, and my professor was a young guy in need of tenure.